Joe Scanga runs the foundation dedicated to the work of his father, artist Italo Scanga.

Joey Scanga was wandering through the Oceanside Museum of Art’s exhibition of his father’s work when one group of metal sculptures, part of the “Candlestick” series, caught his eye.

“This was the last series,” said Scanga, a San Francisco-based architect who also runs the foundation dedicated to his late father’s work. “He died (in 2001) doing this series. That’s the end of his career, right there. And he kind of hit it again.”

“I think there was a gap with some of the assemblage pieces where he didn’t really figure out where he was,” Scanga said. “But these are magical. You can’t tell where one of the pieces of junk starts and the other ends. You can’t even tell where this ugly vase turns into this magical thing.”

That’s the essence of his dad’s sculptures, now on exhibit in “Looking for a Miracle: Italo Scanga” at the Oceanside Museum. The Italian-born, highly acclaimed artist worked in a wide range of mediums, but his sculptures are particularly memorable in the way they transform the everyday objects he acquired as a lifelong collector (some would say hoarder) into works of wonder.

“We threw away 2,000 pounds of brass that wasn’t a candlestick yet out when he died,” Scanga said. “We took it to the dump. It was real close: this was art and this was junk. And somewhere in the middle was: Was this art? Or was this junk?”

Most of the 45 works in the show were in storage in a crammed, cavernous space in the back of Scanga’s Bay Park studio, teeming with treasures, trash and everything in between.

“We had 60 wooden shoes that didn’t become the ‘Metaphysical’ (series),” Scanga said. “We had musical instruments, industrial objects, cranks and cranes and tools that didn’t fit. We had so many different things, it was kind of overwhelming. We’re still dealing with the estate 10 years later.”

And then there was the art, not just his father’s art, as he was also a prolific painter, but pieces from his friends and associates.

“We found some amazing things in the junk,” Scanga said. “You’d look at it and say: Is there a signature on it? Is it a Bruce Nauman or do we throw it in the trash? I’m not kidding you. We found Bruce Naumans, some Donald Judds, Richard Merkins.”

His father had associations with dozens of artists in a career that included degrees from Michigan State University and teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin, Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Penn State, the Tyler School of Art and, most famously, at the University of California San Diego.

“I was a university brat,” Scanga said. “My dad got hired and fired in a lot of different schools. We had moved to five different university cities before I was in kindergarten.”